


Return the Sun

by Temaris



Category: Doctor Who, Primeval
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temaris/pseuds/Temaris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Primeval team discovers another organisation with an interest in the anomalies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Return the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> 1 November 2009. Written for gpr_ffn, whose prompt fitted neatly with a notion that had been lurking for a while at the back of my mind, I hope you enjoy.

There wasn't anything unusual about the anomaly. No reports of rampaging monsters, nothing at all. The alarm went off, the four of them raced to get to it before something came through and started hunting and killing on the green, green valleys of the Rhondda. It was, in fact, about as routine as they get: himself and Jenny, Connor and Abby, plus Becker and a handful of special forces soldiers, which he's never going to be happy about, but can't dispute the need for.

So Nick hadn't really been expecting much. The anomaly itself was halfway up a hill in a stand of trees -- a small mercy. It was a little off the beaten track and just barely out of sight of the road winding around gradient up and down the landscape. Worryingly, he could see a bunch of vehicles parked in the distance at one of the helpfully positioned 'lookout points'. A lovely vista of the valley, which was going to be just perfect if a dinosaur comes through. It was probably only the general bloody public rubbernecking at their helicopter: nothing like subtle, landing a black helicopter in a field in Wales.

He stared up at them, and sighed. Jenny would deal with the fallout: she'd always been the one so all fired keen on keeping the damn thing secret, though he honestly didn't see how long that could last. Becker and his guys finished checking the cordon they'd set up, and everyone turned to him.

"Okay ladies, gentlemen. Let's go see what we've got."

The other side was cool and dim, all browns and oranges, the sun hanging low in the sky, a darker orange than he'd ever seen it even through polluted city skies. That wasn't the surprise.

He'd really thought that after three years he was prepared to see anything once they stepped through an anomaly. Clearly, his definition of 'anything' needed updating, because he certainly wasn't expecting to find a horde of soldiers in red berets and wearing what looked like UN peacekeeping uniforms setting up a perimeter on the far side.

"Who the hell are you?" he snapped at the first one to approach -- a woman in her mid thirties -- as she walked up to him, looked him up and down and held out a hand. He responded automatically, shaking it. Her no-nonsense air and brisk ease with the situation just did not compute.

"Professor Cutter, delighted. I'm Major Erisa Magambo." Her gaze swept the rest of the team with sharp eyes. "UNIT," she added, as though that was supposed to mean something. "We thought we'd lend you people a hand, since it all seems to be getting rather away from you."

"Now just a minute!" Nick began, and then found himself completely drowned out by Connor.

"Magambo? As in Captain Magambo! Oh, hey, I know who you are! You handled the anomaly in the Blackwall Tunnel! With the flying bus!"

"There was no bus, Mr. Temple," she said curtly. "Now, if you'd all like to get clear--"

"How do you know his name?" Abby asked. She frowned and looked at Connor. "Flying bus?"

Major Magambo smiled at her faintly. "The same way I know about your research centre and your adventures through the looking glass, Ms Maitland."

"You're not supposed to be here." Nick scowled around at the bustling military presence. "There's enough secret government involvement already without more random people barging in."

The major raised an eyebrow at them. "The way I see it, you're doing the barging. I was minding my own business dealing with a potentially hazardous temporal event, when you rushed through the anomaly. Without," she added sternly, "a single precaution for discretion or safety that I could see."

"Besides. I have a certain amount of experience in these things." She turned away from them and was immediately accosted by soldiers with clipboards and white coated scientists. She dealt with them swiftly, and each scurried away to more clusters of people, who scattered in turn, their body language purposeful and intent.

"What the *hell*?" Nick said helplessly. "What the hell kind of unit does all this, and what bloody business is this of theirs? And where did all this *come* from?" He gestured at the field operation tents being rapidly set up, the soldiers setting up very large guns at the fenced perimeter, and the scientists huddled around various instruments aimed at the anomaly itself.

"Not 'a' unit, sir," Becker said. "U.N.I.T. Unified Intelligence Task Force." He looked around the red capped men and women, and shook his head. "Geeks and nutjobs. Alien-hunters, if you believe the gossip."

"Counter-terrorism," Jenny said at the same time, and the two of them glared at each other, and then both turned narrow looks on Major Magambo. Jenny stepped forwards, "Professor Cutter has a point, Major," she said firmly. "This is a matter for British government, not a UN taskforce."

"That's not actually your decision, Ms. Brown," Major Magambo said. "And, since you ask, mostly we're the second to last defence of Earth against the Universe."

"The universe? Isn't that a bit of a tall order?" Abby said with an incredulous tilt of her head.

"We're still ahead on points," Magambo said, but she looked like someone for whom the war never ended. Tired and bored of the idiocy of people who didn't know what the hell they were doing interfering with her operation. It was an expression that felt unexpectedly familiar to Nick -- he'd felt it on his own face far too many times. She half turned away, one hand up to an earbug. "I'll be right there. " She turned back, and with a perfunctory, "Excuse me," then headed for one of the tents.

"Major," Connor followed her across a clear area to one of the tents. "Major! What happened at the Tunnel?"

"Connor, we've been through this, you freak. It was a gas leak," Abby said, rolling her eyes. "Did it register on your anomaly detector? No! So: no anomaly. You'd believe anything, you."

"Like dinosaurs coming through space time to rampage through the Forest of Dean?" Connor said cheerfully. "I was right about that, wasn't I? Wasn't I, Professor?" he looked at Nick for backup.

Nick shrugged. "Abby's covered most of it. Besides, if it was an anomaly, doesn't that mean your anomaly detector isn't picking all of them up?"

Connor looked momentarily stymied, "Well, that's why I need data on it!" He turned a pleading expression on the major, who ignored him entirely.

Nick stumped after them into the command tent, and shook his head at the explosion of technology and wiring crammed into it. "What on earth is all this nonsense?"

Magambo looked back at him, frowning. "This nonsense, Professor Cutter, is an effort to save you all from yourselves. There've been complaints."

"Complaints? What complaints! We're trying to stop the bloody Jurassic from eating Croydon and you've got 'complaints'!" he said heatedly. "We've lost too many lives to just hand everything over to some random militia with delusions of grandeur."

"Yes, sir. You *have* lost too many lives." She turned and looked directly at Jenny. "I'm very sorry, Ms Brown."

"My name isn't Brown! How many times do I have to tell you people --" She stopped, staring at Nick who seized Major Magambo's arm, utterly taken aback.

"You know!" he said, eyes wide. "You know about the time lines changing."

"Of course. As I said, Professor Cutter. There have been complaints." She turned to one of the white coated men and said, "Dr. Taylor, any news yet?"

"No, nothing yet. Major, are you sure about this, I mean, it was Him, but this is fascinating! The implications for general relativity alone are just --"

"Let me know as soon as you have a definite read on the time lines."

"Wait, wait just a minute here. " Nick shook his head, trying to get his head around the idea that these people were blithely talking about the changes as though they were a matter of fact, and not the sort of thing that nearly got him sectioned. "Time lines? And you know about the change to history."

"Caused by your wife. Yes." Magambo eyed him steadily, and Nick held her gaze.

"It's not my fault Helen--"

"Not your fault, no. But you didn't exactly make it any better, did you?" Her gaze was direct, and Nick winced.

"I know things didn't go well, but we didn't have the resources--"

"True. And now I do have the resources, and we're going to fix it."

"What do you mean fix?" he asked suspiciously.

"Close them once and for all. Restabilise space-time and stop the anomalies," Major Magambo said quite matter of factly.

"How the hell are you going to do that? We've barely managed to identify where they come through, and we've been working on it for nigh on three years now!"

"We've had some outside help, see," the man the major had called Doctor Taylor spoke up.

"Doctor!" Magambo said sharply, and Taylor wilted.

"Oh! Oh, yes, right." He turned back to his equipment, and Connor sidled over quietly, peering over his shoulder. Nick was about to follow as the two started talking, but a hand on his elbow made him jump.

"Professor, we have a narrow window of opportunity, and I need to know: do you know where your wife is at this moment?"

He jerked away from the major's grip. "No. And I wouldn't tell you if I did know, not after the way you people treated her last time."

"Not us, Professor Cutter," Magambo said mildly. She sighed. "Walk with me, Professor, Ms Lewis."

"And do what?"

"Listen."

But she said nothing more until they were well clear of the tent, Jenny in their wake as they headed across uneven rocks to the perimeter fence. Mist roiled around its edges, but seemed reluctant to come closer. He frowned at the uneven footing: igneous rock, but showing rusted and red in places. No plant life at all, for all that the rocks appeared to have weathered. Somewhere nearby water broke on a shore, and he added that to his mental list of telltales for identifying the eon they were in, and shook his head.

"Have you determined what period it is?" he asked abruptly. It absolutely wasn't possible, what he was thinking, but --

"The boffins think Archeaen."

He stopped dead. "Impossible. " He looked around. "We wouldn't even be able to breathe. Everything we know says the oxygen content of the Archaean atmosphere didn't reach breathable levels until --" He stepped closer to the fence. It buzzed low and deep, the electricity making his hair stand up.

Magambo half smiled at him. "The air is coming from tanks, and is held behind a force field." She nodded at what he'd taken to be just a perimeter fence.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. Nothing in. Nothing out. Zero contamination." She paused a long moment, watching him, but he was peering out through the force field.

"Brown skies," he said, and squinted through the haze at the sun, darkly orange and too cool on his skin as it sank towards the sea. Another sunset, he thought, only, no eyes had ever seen this one. No feet had walked on these rocks, igneous, pristine, the only inhabitants microbes so ancient that it made his brain ache thinking about it. Far, far distant, and right now.

"Poisonous." Jenny said softly. "But beautiful." He nodded, and leaned a little closer to her. They might have their differences, but this they could agree on.

The rocks tumbled down towards muddy looking water -- the first ancient seas. They were banded red and grey and he half smiled at this sign of life. "The cyanobacteria--"

"Plentiful I'm told, and busy doing their job -- they've a few million years to go before the atmosphere flips," the major said. He nodded, half wishing they could go back even further, see the coalescence of the earth itself. With the right equipment, even the very origins of the universe could not be much out of reach. "The boffins are going crazy gathering data," she added. "I don't know what they're going to do with it: there's no way they're ever going to be able tell anyone."

"The joy of knowing is enough, sometimes. Knowledge for its own sake," he replied, and she huffed a chuckle under her breath.

"I've heard that before. That's what they always say, and then just one of them decides it wouldn't hurt if they *just*... and then it's my job to put it all back again. Still." She stood straighter. "It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last, I dare say."

"Can I see the data once we're back?"

"Temporal paradox, Professor Cutter. No guarantees of anything." She shrugged. "Provisionally: yes, certainly. If it still exists. If we remember this conversation. If it ever happened in the first place."

Nick nodded. "So what happens next?"

"We do our job here and go home, restoring the timeline to its original track, before people started screwing around with space-time. And then we keep a watching brief for the anomalies and chase down whoever started them. They're artificial you know. Your wife found that first one by accident, but she's been abusing them for a very long time." Before Nick could chase that cryptic comment further Jenny spoke up.

"What?" Jenny said sharply. "Who made them?"

The Major shook her head. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me," Nick challenged her. She considered him carefully, but he couldn't tell what she was thinking.

"UNIT is tasked with defending Earth against alien incursions," she said finally. Nick laughed, he didn't mean to, and any humour drained away as he realised she was deadly serious.

"So that thing Connor was talking about --"

"The wormhole in Blackwall Tunnel. Yes. An attempt by a species of alien to migrate to our planet. "

"And of course you shot them?"

"Have you ever seen the Sahara, Professor Cutter?" the major said sharply. "Ever stood in the middle of an endless desert, with just dunes as far as the eye can see?"

Nick had, once, not the Sahel, but ancient sands. He'd nearly lost Stephen then. The thought gave him pause; if the timelines were restored, would Stephen be restored? She kept referring to Jenny as Ms Brown, maybe Claudia would be too. Maybe even Connor's friend and Captain Ryan. Maybe even Helen herself.

"San Helios had a hundred billion inhabitants. Rich and green, full of life, from the heights to the depths. And in a few weeks they were obliterated by the Swarm. Every living creature, from the least living single celled organism to the most complex. Every plant. Every bacterium. Everything. Until the cities and forests were just sand. Waterless, silent sand."

"The Swarm travel by generating their own wormhole. It's like water, they seek the path of least resistance, the places where space-time is already fractured -- and they tried to come here."

"Fractured? Because of the anomalies?"

"Because of the anomalies that your wife -- and those who taught her -- created." She looked grim for a moment. "We are going to deal with Helen Cutter ourselves, I'm afraid."

Nick winced, but it wasn't as though he expected anything different. "She didn't mean any harm at the start." It was all he could think of to say. He'd loved her; missed her; mourned her. Sometimes he wished that he'd never seen a living dinosaur. That he'd never met her.

Magambo looked away awkwardly. "So, Professor, is this the furthest back you've ever been?"

Nick had to think. "Probably. There was the one anomaly which was Pre-Cambrian--"

"But there were multi-cellular creatures?"

"Aye." Great scuttling things, which tried to eat them, and slithered through the sulphurous fog with low eerie sounds.

"In that case, we're safe in the assumption that they are later than this." She gestured at the hazy orange skies and the brown water. "We thought so from your reports, but it's always worth checking."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"Me?" she glanced at him. "Nothing. Doctor Taylor and a -- colleague -- have developed what we believe to be a solution to the entire problem. It requires some delicate alterations to the planet's core."

"That sounds rather ... extreme," Jenny said.

"I'm told it's part of Earth's history, so, we know it was done, we know how to do it, and we even have a timeline of when we need to do it. The Doctor assures us this will stabilise the anomalies and generate sufficient field to protect the Earth for as long as it has a magnetic field."

"I'm not following you -- you're fixing the timeline by changing the timeline?"

"I don't know the details. I'm just here to ensure the mission is successful. And that involves making sure you people don't get in the way."

"Why would we get in the way?" Jenny retorted briskly, "If you can stop them permanently that would solve all our problems. The Home Office could only approve." Nick choked.

"But--"

"Science for science's sake," the major said quietly, and raised her eyebrows at him, and he felt his skin redden.

"Knowledge isn't more important than a human life," he said, "if you can close the damn things permanently, then I'm not going to get in your way."

Major Magambo smiled. "Good. They should be done soon, I hope."

"What exactly are they doing?"

"Your Mr. Temple had the right idea: he just didn't think big enough.," she said, and shook her head. Far away the sun slipped below the horizon, the astonishing reds and oranges dwindling to twilight purples and greys startlingly fast. "We should pack up. Better not to stay any longer than we can help."

As they walked up towards the anomaly Connor and Abby emerged from the operations tent, both looking shaken.

"Professor!" Connor called, and the two of them ran to join Nick and Jenny.

"Are they really doing what I think they are?" Nick said.

"If you mean reversing --"

"Look!!" Abby interrupted him. "There!"

The sky lit, a vast curtain of blueish light winding and twisting high in the twilight sky.

"Aurora Borealis," Nick murmured.

"Australis, not Borealis," Doctor Taylor said. "We're a long way south, well, south for now," he added, and bounced. "Just gorgeous." He grinned up at the sky. "Now, Major, if we just went back another billion or so years, we'd *really* see something."

"Oooh, the Big Bang." Connor actually rubbed his hands gleefully. Nick and Jenny exchanged amused looks.

"Perhaps changing the Earth's poles and closing the anomalies will do for today," Major Magambo said briskly. "Everyone, mission accomplished, back to the twenty-first century."

"That's it?" Nick said dubiously to the enthusiastic scientist trotting along towards the anomaly. "Change it once?"

"Oh no. No. Proof of concept, you might say. We'll see how this one works, and then we have a schedule, a very strict schedule, of times to restabilise the magnetosphere." He stopped in his tracks and looked up. "Beautiful, beautiful maths."

"The maths may be beautiful, but has it worked?" Jenny asked. She raised her eyebrows. "After all, I'm still here..."

Major Magambo paused and met her eyes. "We'll know when we return home."

They all paused for a long moment, all eyes on Jenny. Only Nick remembered Claudia, and even he had come to his own sort of peace with the change. And now it was all going to change again.

Jenny took a deep breath. "Well, let's get going then," she said, and turned on her heel heading for the anomaly until Nick stopped her, a hand on her arm.

"Jenny--"

"It's fine," she said, but she wouldn't meet his eyes.

The soldiers were breaking the site down, quickly packing everything into boxes that stacked onto compact little golf carts.

"We'll go through last," Major Magambo said firmly. "The forcefield will be closed down from the other side, and we'll bring it through remotely. Nothing left behind."

They waited in silence. Jenny didn't pull away from Nick's hand, and he very cautiously patted her shoulder.

"It'll be fine, you'll see," he said, and Jenny shook her head.

"No, you'll see, won't she, Connor?" Abby said, joining them to stand on Jenny's other side.

Connor ducked his head, twisting his hat out of all recognition. "We'll probably think so, yeah," he said.

"But I remembered," Nick protested. "When we changed the timelines, I remembered."

"Even if we remember, we'll be the only people who do," Connor said. "Same as you. We'll remember a timeline that never was, and we might not remember the new one."

"Well don't bloody tell anyone," Nick said with a grim laugh. "They'll only start talking about nice quiet wards and body fitting jackets that fasten in the back."

"UNIT will remember," the major said quietly. "We won't be surprised. If you want to come to us, do."

They all looked dubious, and she grinned at them. "Don't look like that, you never know. It might come in handy one day. Here." She held out business cards. "If you bring these in, you'll be taken seriously."

"I thought you'd decided we were a bunch of incompetents who bollixed up, what did you call it? Space-time?"

"I think you did the best you could under difficult circumstances. But next time, call us in. We'll be waiting." She nodded at him, and added, "Well. I'll see you on the other side."

The last of the carts trundled through the anomaly as they watched, the last of the soldiers in tow.

"Time to go," Connor said, and slid an uncertain look at Abby, who rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand. "If you guys, I mean, if I'm not --"

"I'll look you up, idiot," Abby said, and kissed him on the cheek. "I'll look you all up."

Nick met her eyes and nodded. "That's a promise," he agreed, and smiled at Connor too. They'd probably meet anyway, but it would be good to have people who remembered. Good to have Connor and Abby.

Abby hugged Jenny, and whispered something that made her laugh. Connor shook her hand uncomfortably. Then the two of them walked towards the anomaly, disappearing through, Connor throwing them one last look before they were gone, and it was just them.

Jenny smiled up at him. "Time to fix the world, Professor," she said, and he seized her wrist and tugged her in close, burying his face in her hair as they held on to each other.

"We'll be fine," he said. "We'll look you up, and it'll be okay."

Jenny leaned into him. "I won't remember you. I probably won't remember any of it."

"Maybe," he agreed. "But when did that ever stop me?"

She laughed, though the sound cracked in the middle. "True." She drew a deep breath and stepped back from him. "Well. Come on then. Let's go see this brave new world."

And they stepped through the anomaly hand in hand.


End file.
